Bring Your Life Into Alignment

October 20, 2017

When you have a satisfactory answer to a big question related to the nature of life, the universe, and everything, the real challenge is integrating that answer into your daily life. How can you act in alignment with your most important values and beliefs?

Accepting Misalignment

The first step is to notice misalignment. Ask yourself this question: Where do I feel out of alignment right now?

Where are the misalignments? In which areas of life do you not feel that your best self is shining through?

When you recognize some of these misalignments, accept them for what they are. Accept the truths you’re observing. Try to treat truth alignment as a separate phase from love and power alignment. Don’t worry about exploring your desires and taking action in a new direction until you’ve accepted the truth that your current path is out of alignment.

Have you ever experienced that moment of clarity when you realized that you absolutely needed to transition out of your job or relationship, only to watch yourself delaying action for months? In such circumstances people are often tempted to justify their actions by pretending they’re okay with their current situation.

Don’t pretend. Don’t justify. Let the situation be lousy, and admit the truth to yourself.

Next, work on accepting the consequences of your truth. You’re probably shifting towards a major transition, one that will create ripples across all areas of your life. There’s no getting around that. This type of transition is a big deal, and it’s going to take courage, patience, and persistence.

Keep reminding yourself of the importance of alignment. If you’ve discovered a profound answer, and you’ve intelligently reasoned your way to the truth of it, remind yourself that there can be no satisfaction for you in the long run if you don’t bring your life into alignment with your truth.

Welcome the challenge that you’re facing. Stop resisting it, and just surrender to it. This type of challenge will make you stronger.

Turning Profound Answers Into Daily Practice

Perhaps my #1 tool for turning profound answers into daily practice is what I call Daily Conscious Time. This is a deliberate investment, typically 15-30 minutes per day but sometimes an hour or more, to work on alignment issues.

I usually do this in the form of journaling. Here are some of the questions I ask and answer during this time:

Where does my life still feel out of alignment?

What would a stronger alignment look like?

What steps can I take to transition to a stronger alignment?

Here’s an example of how I may have answered some of these questions with respect to an alignment challenge I was facing back in 2008 when I was earning $12-13K per month from having third-party advertising on my website.

I’m making good money from advertising, and it’s easy passive income. I could probably continue making a living this way for many years. But this doesn’t feel aligned. I don’t really want to be in the advertising business. This isn’t a path with a heart for me. It was a growth experience to explore this for a while, but it’s not going to help me grow if I keep doing this. The ads distract my readers, and I know they’d be better served by sticking around to read more articles. I can’t really control the ads that Google Adsense is serving up on my site each day, and I often don’t feel aligned with the ads I do see. If I keep earning income this way, I’m going to trap myself. I can’t allow my income streams to pull me out of alignment.

I like abundance, but I want a more heart-centered way to create it. My priority is to help people grow, so I need a business model that enhances this aspect whereas advertising detracts from it. To have stronger alignment here, I need to feel more congruent with my business models. I know that when I seek a path with a heart and decline to settle for a partial match, everything works out beautifully – usually better than I imagined. Life is testing me here. I know that alignment is more important than money, and an ad-free site would feel more aligned to me.

In the long run, I’ll need to experiment with other business models, such as direct sales of products or workshops. I could transition gradually, allowing the ads to keep running until I have replacement income streams established. But that feels cowardly. I see the truth here, and trying to transition slowly is very risky; that will just keep me stuck for longer, possibly for years. If I remove the ads now, my income will drop significantly, but I’ll feel more motivated to explore alternatives, and I trust my creativity. This will release a lot of stagnant energy and get me thinking in new directions, and it’s sure to improve my relationship with my readers. What would my best self do? He’d remove the ads and not look back. Actually doing that would take only minutes, but it would surely change the direction of my life (and my readers lives) for the better.

Imagine doing this kind of personal growth work almost every day, working through alignment issues large and small and doing your best to resolve them. You may not always succeed, but in the long run, this persistence will yield a more aligned life from top to bottom.

Take these alignment issues seriously. They truly matter. These challenges will test you, and you may feel that life is asking too much of you when it presents you with such a challenge. At first it may even feel like more of a curse than a blessing, but when you work through enough of these, you may actually start to welcome them because these are among the richest growth experiences you’ll encounter in this life.